Dehumanisation - humans respond

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The writer Ahmad Shah Abed left Afghanistan to avoid forced recruitment by the Taliban. "They started collecting young lads again and many people were killed," he writes. He is in a psychiatric hospital after three years in detention in Port Hedland. Mary Yousefi, an Iranian secretary still in Baxter after three years, writes: "My son finds it hard to sleep and when he does he has very bad nightmares and wakes up screaming." The journalist Cheikh Kone fled Africa after penning an article critical of the Ivory Coast Government. He spent three years at Port Hedland, and writes: "... we have been painted as criminals and terrorists ... we have been dehumanised and our plight ignored".

These stories come from Another Country, a collection of refugees' writing published this week, giving voices to people usually not heard. They show the consequences of the Federal Government's actions, which were examined in detail in the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission's report on Australia's immigration detention policy regarding children. The commission measured the Government's policies and practices against the United Nations' Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which Australia is a signatory. That convention requires detention of children to be a measure of last resort - Australia uses it as the measure of first resort for all children, irrespective of their individual situation. That detention, the commission says, is "automatic, indeterminate, arbitrary and effectively unreviewable".

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Imprisoned children are exposed to riots, fires, hunger strikes, protests, lip-sewing, suicide attempts, tear gas and water cannons. They see razor wire and feel frightened and unsafe. Their health - physical and mental - suffers. The trauma that led them to flee to Australia - 93 per cent of children in detention are eventually granted refugee status - is compounded by their treatment in what they thought would be a haven. "No other country in the world has a policy like this," writes the commission, not in praise. It attacks as mean-spirited and destructive a Federal Government policy which goes way beyond the stated aim of border protection.

The Federal Government justifies its approach, and maintains a level of support for it, in two ways. It states that the Government should decide who is allowed to enter the country. But it also ensures Australians are ill informed about who these refugees are. Detention centres are placed in deserts and on remote islands; it denies access to most visitors and to the media; and uses terms such as "illegals" and "queue-jumpers".

But reports such as the commission's, and books like Another Country, provide an alternative view - that asylum seekers are people rather than numbers, that Australia provides punishment rather than refuge, and that children detained suffer enormously. Overhauling detention laws and practices regarding children, as the commission recommends, is the starting point for a reassessment of Australia's treatment of asylum seekers.

Bigger targets for the taxman

Apart from its well-publicised blitz on barristers in recent years, the Australian Tax Office's compliance efforts have been directed more towards small fry than the bigger fish waiting to be caught. Now the partners in two large tax advisory and accounting firms have been asked to pay substantial amounts. One firm's partners are said to have settled recently with the Tax Office. Present and former partners in another, KPMG, hit with unpaid tax assessments totalling up to $100 million, are about to.

KPMG's chief executive, Lindsay Maxsted, says the firm has no lessons to learn because it has not avoided tax. "We're prepared to settle for a certain amount," he says, "just to keep the monkey off our back." That unyielding stance leaves unclear how much will be paid and indeed, the extent of tax properly payable at all. Assuming, however, that the Tax Office's assessment is fair and correct, these cases point to the potentially significant sums that so far have gone uncollected from professionals and others in the business world.

The collection of all taxes properly owed is essential not only to the economic health of the nation, which depends on taxation revenue for the functioning of government and its manifold public services. It is also essential to the taxation system itself. Nothing does more to disincline citizens from paying their fair share than the perception that others are not paying theirs.

Strengthening the Tax Office's anti-avoidance capacity is therefore to be welcomed - as long as it operates fairly in all cases. Its successful pursuit of members of the legal profession - uncovering in some cases egregious examples of lack of civic responsibility - and now the settlement of claims against partners in large tax and accounting firms are good signs.

The fact that in these latest cases those caught with unpaid assessments have decided to settle rather than go to court suggests another advance. Some years ago, high among the Tax Office's greatest difficulties was not its lack of resources but the willingness of the High Court - especially in the days of the Barwick court - to interpret taxation laws in ways that added to their complexity and defeat the plain intent of the Parliament. That made avoidance easier, at least for those able to pay for the smartest lawyers. If judges no longer prop up the tax avoidance industry that has in the past made the fortunes of many at the bar, it is a huge advance towards a fairer system for all taxpayers.